Update: I was unfortunately not aware of Shamus Young's severe criticism of Fallout 3 available here to link in the original piece and I regret that. It dovetails rather nicely with what I've written and it's much better executed than my piece. I strongly recommend anyone...

Was going to wait and read reviews but watched the first 15 minute preview of the Pilot (which was pretty good) and saw a few new gameplay vids so I caved and bought Defiance at midnight. Install 10gb (~30minutes) and installed patch (another 15 minutes). Then got the message "Welcome to Defiance! The game has not yet launched. We look forward to having you join us on April 2nd at 8am"

Son of a bitch. Halfway through this 6six pack and nothing to show for it. So pissed right now.

Loose Cannon, my fav craft beer and 7% abv to boot. From what I'm reading in the defiance forums is they are only launching live in certain areas at certain times to reduce load but some EST time people say they get in and I can't. Also could just be trolls saying they are playing. This better be worth it lol.

Sorry to say that you ended up getting the worst of all three. The issues on PS3 and PC are minimal, with extreme cases being rare. The worst thing that's happened to me, is my fully modded weapons disappearing, and the lag whenever someone joins a PvP match, that's pretty much it. II bought it on PSN, and there was a....45mb patch, maybe? Then the game ran patches itself which took about 30 minutes. When I heard about all of the patches at launch on 360, I couldn't help but wonder what was going on.

The only console gameplay they ever showed pre-launch was 360. The beta was originally shorter than the PS3's (not sure if that was due to Trion or Microsoft), and the focus seemed to be more about playing the game on 360. So...what happened? They say it's because of the Xbox cluster, maybe that's why the 360 has a total of what, 3 MMO's? I'm sure they are capable of fixing these problems quickly, and hopefully the patch on the 15th and the next one later this month will craft a better experience, but there needs to be a better explanation from Trion as to how this happened. The strange thing is, these issues weren't even in the beta. To be fair, that was a 2 1/2 month old build, and with new implementations comes new bugs, but idk...something's off.

I've been loving every minute of the game, and I also enjoy how they handled phases/shards/servers. I hate when I head to a mission and there are already players there who have completed two-thirds of it, and I have to do it from there. But more often than not, you will switch to a less crowded phase, without even knowing it. The aiming is a little stiff at first, and things like X/Y and zoom sensitivity are absent, but I don't regret the $60 I spent, and I'm pretty sure I'll be picking up the season pass. I hope things change on the Xbox side, so you can actually get your money's worth_________________

Heath_Hindman wrote:

Also who is going to eat all of the sandwiches you make if there are no men. Tree falls in the woods

Honestly I was half way through a sixer and buzzed/pissed cuz I couldn't play immediately upon buying the game. Otherwise I understand the launch of an MMO like this, especially on the console side where it's mostly unfamiliar territory.

Although, I have no qualms about the core of the game and I'm playing infrequently enough (busy with work/end of school) that I've missed most of the bad server stuff.

I'm getting invested in the lore/story which simply makes everything that much better. I just wish I had a buddy to play with since my roommate isn't willing to get live/buy the game to play together. I've been around the official forums looking for a semi-active clan but until they fix the essentially broken chat mechanics that makes a significant barrier for the social aspect of the MMO.

I enjoy how there is alot to do. The plethora of quests (including randoms events, haven't gotten to contracts), challenges, pvp, co-op and arkfalls makes me not get bored when I would otherwise just wander around and shoot stuff. Althrough the arkfalls are mostly redundant, I still like finding a random minor arkfall with just 1 or 2 people busting ass to try and defeat it within the time limit - it feels pretty rewarding even though the rewards are minor. However, I think some of the patches are going to address this.

Once the major patches come through that fix some of the minor stuff (chat, queue for shadow wars etc) I think the game will shine and perhaps the reviews could potentially be alot better but alas, such is the launch of an MMO. I'll stll play and watch the show cuz I'm already addicted and it's a fresh take on MMO since it's a shooter and not a cookie cutter WoW-clone (I'm looking at you SWTOR). First time I've lost sleep playing a game since Skyrim.

Last edited by drathbone on Thu Apr 11, 2013 8:21 pm; edited 1 time in total

My only issue with the story is the whole "silent protagonist thing" and your group not showing up during cutscenes. It basically takes the feeling the gameplay gives you, and flips out around. Solitary moments, and you're just a puppet without a voice. There are so seriously amazing scenes the deeper you go, but I couldn't help but wish my character was actually more than a hired hand. It takes away from the immersion quite a bit, but I don't think you'll have noticed this yet, if you're still in the early missions. Hopefully this'll change with the off-season/season 2 content updates.

There was a server update that really did help the queue for Shadow War. I'm not a fan of being put into on-going matches, but it's better than waiting 30 minutes in a broken queue. Even if the match hasn't started, whenever I queue up, it usually only needs 10 more players.

Thanks for the link. Glad to see LMG's getting a little bump since that's what I primarily use. Lot's of great things in that patch. They should have simply delayed the game a week but whatever. I think everything sounds great and they are clearly working very hard to fix the small/medium things that would make a good game otherwise a great game (IMO). There's a lot of polishing up here that's gonna be good.

I do agree with the whole silent treatment on your character (haven't partied enough to notice team being cut out) but it's pretty minor when it comes down to the big picture.

Thanks for the link. Glad to see LMG's getting a little bump since that's what I primarily use. Lot's of great things in that patch. They should have simply delayed the game a week but whatever. I think everything sounds great and they are clearly working very hard to fix the small/medium things that would make a good game otherwise a great game (IMO). There's a lot of polishing up here that's gonna be good.

I do agree with the whole silent treatment on your character (haven't partied enough to notice team being cut out) but it's pretty minor when it comes down to the big picture.

It's a lot more annoying when you're thrown into the forced solo missions...which are solo for no good reasons and usually are much better than the other missions. Have you completed Breaking into San Quentin yet?_________________

Heath_Hindman wrote:

Also who is going to eat all of the sandwiches you make if there are no men. Tree falls in the woods